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A new queer bar is opening in the Peacock Building, the Buckman neighborhood building that housed Crush Bar for nearly the past quarter century. And this time they’ll share the same name.
Aaron Grimmer is part of a team creating a new bar inside the former Crush space on the corner of Southeast 14th Avenue and Morrison Street. Named for the building and its historic legacy as a bakery of the same name, Peacock will reactivate the corner that went quiet after Crush closed on New Year’s Eve 2024 and its neighboring LGBTQ+ video lounge, Sissy Bar, shuttered just before that Halloween. Portland food news blog Bridgetown Bites first reported the story.
“Hopefully we can appeal to different subgroups within the queer community,” Grimmer tells WW. “We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves into just being for young people or old people or certain factions. I’d love it if all those different groups feel welcome here.”
Grimmer and his soon-to-be five-person team—including Pacific Northwest College of Arts professor Phoenix McNamara, the to-be-identified heads of Peacock’s bar and kitchen (Grimmer promises they have some industry buzz to their name but is finalizing the details), and a silent partner—are hard at work with volunteer support to open Peacock by LGBTQ+ Pride Festival weekend in July. Grimmer was part of another team that looked into buying the Peacock Building, and though he didn’t go that route, he and his silent partner became infatuated with the space’s possibilities.
“The bones of what Crush had, we’re basically keeping the same,” he says. “We don’t have to reinvent everything to make it work.”
McNamara is updating Crush’s Y2K Tuscan color scheme to peacock-hue blue-green with gold accents, and she’s decorating with hot pink-framed mirrors and a planned mural of a peacock and phoenix in harmony. The build-out will remove a side office space to add a second bar (which McNamara has poured purple glitter epoxy over) to speed up service on show nights.
McNamara is also updating the building’s historically significant gender-neutral bathrooms with a remarkably gradient color scheme. Grimmer notes that Crush’s former owner, Woody Clarke, had to obtain a special permit from the City of Portland for its bathroom when it opened in 2001.
“They had to have a special exemption, and they had to justify why this was a thing that could be done,” Grimmer says. “It’s a cool thing that Woody and Crush’s people believed in, and now it’s much more commonplace, but in a lot of ways I think they were pioneering in what they were trying to make a safe space for queer and trans folks, and that’s something we want to maintain for sure.”
Grimmer says the breakfast sandwich shop Bialy Bird is nesting next door, revamping an adjacent cafe space to Peacock. He says the shop will serve brunch on weekends once both businesses are up and operational. Jay Colby—a member of the House of Colby drag family whose members Kerri and Sasha Colby appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race (Chappell Roan’s a big fan of Sasha Colby, in case you haven’t heard)—will help organize drag entertainment, though Grimmer and McNamara hope to see more kinds of events, from burlesque and spoken word readings to makers markets and pre-protest organization. Grimmer’s main goal, he says, is making sure Peacock is accessible, affordable and welcoming to all, particularly trans and queer patrons.
“We want to be intentional even when it comes to our menu—vegan options, nonalcoholic options, gluten-free options—and then we want to make sure our price point is so high that it feels exclusionary, like you have to pay a lot to be here,” Grimmer says. “We’ll have those options, but for me, part of being safe and welcome means you can afford to be here, and that’s going to be important for us too.”